[K12OSN] No one can log in! Advice please.

[Chuck Kollars]

> The biggest user we have is using 400 MB. You are 
> right that 37 GB is small nowadays. When we 
> originally purchased the drives (37x2 SCSI drives in
> a hardware RAID mirror configuration) it was the 
> most we could afford. However, we only have 12 
> computers, and a total userbase of 25 students, so 
> it has been more that sufficient for several years. 
> I also backup and wipe it at the end of every school
> year for a fresh install. Are there any other 
> possibilities? 

After horrible problems with "out of space" for
several years, we now have situation that totally
takes care of itself. (Hooray!)

We average less than 10MB per student, even including
some digital photography classes and a bunch of
students that graduated. And we don't even do
anything. 

We did several things that each helped a little.
First, we automatically notified a student whenever
their space usage got "too high". Second, whenever a
student stored .MP3s (which are "large"), we
automatically notified them they might be in violation
of a copyright. And third, we figured out how to
enable and use "quotas" in Linux to keep the lid on a
situation so it couldn't get totally out of hand. (Our
"quota" setting is more than a dozen times higher than
typical actual use; it's a distant threat rather than
a constant presence.)

Just one thing made much of the difference! That was
implementing the "recycle" feature (a "VFS" addon) of
Samba that puts a "network trash can" in each
directory. As part of the implementation we set up
automatic emptying of the trash -- any file in the
trash that hasn't been touched in 30 days gets
deleted. (We use the `find` command which execs `rm`
as needed.)

Now our disk space takes care of itself. We don't
allocate hardly any mindshare to it any more, all we
do is a `df` once every couple months to make sure
nothing has gone wrong causing the disk to get full.
And if our students are typical, you should have
_plenty_ of space on your disk. 

thanks!



-Chuck Kollars


      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Looking for last minute shopping deals?  
Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.  http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping